Scaled Composites, LLC

Happy Holidays from Scaled Composites!

Happy Winter Solstice! If you are looking for a festive craft with some airplane flair, here are patterns for Scaled Airplane Paper Snowflakes. #papersnowflake #craft #kidscraft #wintercrafts #decoration

You may have noticed red shirts in a lot of our first flight photos – this good luck tradition started during the SpaceShipOne program when all the teams wore specific color shirts and a comment was made by the White Knight team “we now have to wear red shirts before each flight for luck.” This spread into other teams over the years, and nowadays red shirts are worn for good luck on flight days!   #RedShirts #ButNotLikeStarTrek #goodluckcharm #FirstFlightFridays

Want to be a part of designing, building, and testing the next unique, new aircraft? Scaled Composites is hiring diverse talent to take part in innovative aerospace – apply today! www.scaled.com/careers #business #flighttest #testpilot #engineer #mechanic #informationtechnology

SpaceShipOne celebrated the centennial of the Wright Brothers’ first flight in style in 2003 with the first powered flight of the little soon-to-be spaceship on December 17th! During flight 11P, Pete Siebold and Cory Bird flew WhiteKnight to 47,900 feet and released SpaceShipOne with Brian Binnie aboard as pilot. The rocket motor burn took SpaceShipOne up to an apogee of 67,800 feet where SpaceShipOne deployed its feather to descend and return to glide configuration by 35,000 feet. While the landing was a little rough with a gear collapse, this flight was key in proving out SpaceShipOne’s flight profile on its path to space. #FirstFlightFridays #spaceflight #SpaceShipOne

On December 16, 2017, Scaled took the Stratolaunch “Roc” aircraft out for a very important milestone: its first taxi test. While this particular test didn’t reach any great speeds, moving this behemoth underneath its own power for the first time demonstrated the fundamental ability to control the aircraft speed and direction on the runway – vital first steps of a ground test campaign building up to a first flight!   #FirstFlightFridays #Roc #Stratolaunch #taxitest #testearlytestoften #groundtest

The VisionAire Vantage, a single-engine light business jet prototype, made its first flight on November 16, 1996!   #FirstFlightFridays #BusinessJet #prototype

Happy Thanksgiving! Here in Mojave, we’re grateful for our amazing employees and interesting projects - what are you grateful for?

What’s with all the water around first flights? When someone has their first flight in one of Scaled’s experimental aircraft, we like to celebrate with a Splash – a gathering of coworkers with buckets, water guns, and other conveyors of water will greet the person who just flew on landing to drench them in a tradition we adopted from military pilots. While some folks will stand and take in the water, others will hit the ground running and make their coworkers chase after!   #FirstFlightFridays #splash #suddenrainstorms #desertrain

After completing a flight series with a safety pilot to prove out the aircraft and VMS, Raptor D-2 threw off the reins and made its first unmanned flight on November 16, 1996!   Learn more about the Raptor vehicles here: https://lnkd.in/grqgVRB8   #FirstFlightFridays #UAV #unmannedflight